A few links to make up for not posting:

Supreme Court blogs

The UKSC Blog has a post on other supreme court blogs in other countries, in particular Ex Tempore in Ireland:

“Ex Tempore” is a lawyers’ latin term meaning, roughly, “at the time.” Unusually for a Supreme Court, the Irish Supreme Court resolves a large proportion of its cases ex tempore, by issuing its decision orally at the conclusion of the argument, without issuing a written judgment. The name “Ex Tempore” also captures the strengths and limits of any blog that covers a working Court: the blog posts are timely and off-the-cuff.

Also Strasbourg Observers, a project of Ghent University to observe the European Court of Human Rights. There’s also an ECJ blog, and of course the SCOTUSblog. Court artist was also new to me, as was The Court (Canada).

North American English dialects

Rick Aschmann has developed a site where he collects YouTube videos and locates their pronunciation on a map. About himself he writes:

I am a professional linguist and a Christian missionary, working in indigenous Amerindian languages. My work has nothing to do with English, so that is why this project is just a hobby.

A few readers have asked where I am from, and what dialect I speak. Actually, I am the total opposite of the kind of people I am looking for for the sound samples on my map: They have each been born and raised in one specific place in the U.S. or Canada. I was born in Mexico City, the son of Christian missionaries, and moved back and forth between Mexico and various places in the U.S. throughout my childhood, spending most of my time in the U.S. in the Oklahoma City area. My parents met in Mexico.

Agony aunt on relationships with German men

Jill Sommer recently had an entry on her blog – it’s the latest one today – I gather it will be deleted in a week’s time, so this link may be dead. The entry was posted in June 2008, and the comments have developed into an exchange between mainly American women who can’t understand the signals German men are sending or not sending, with Jill taking the role of the agony aunt. One of them refers to her ‘joining the forum’, so I suppose they have little idea of the main topic of the blog. I can’t offer any advice on this subject myself, even though the locals believe the only reason a British woman would move to Franconia would be to marry a German (they don’t regard this as an insult, I mean the fact that marriage dictates one’s life).

I’m a bit late for Burns Night, but I see (by accident) that there is a supplier in Germany who will supply frozen haggis: haggis.de. The haggis comes originally from MacSween of Edinburgh.

The German on the site is a bit odd in places, but it seems to be the typing rather than the original content.

Der Haggis wird im gefrorenem Zustand geliefert. Mindestens 1 Tag vorher im Kühlschrank auftauchen lassen….

…muss legendlich erhitzt werden…

It’s said to be delivered through Kilts & More – you can probably order it through them too. You can even get vegetarian haggis, so there’s nothing to stop you.

You can see the big A for Apotheke in this photo of the Rathaus (reflected in the big Apotheke window).

Buurtaal wrote about this phenomenon a few weeks ago (in German – here’s an English article about the subject).

If you buy something, most of these chemists (pharmacists) give you a small present. A pack of paper handkerchiefs is good. The worst is if you get something really expensive, like tablets for 600 euros, and they feel obliged to give you something ‘valuable’ that may be not to your taste. There’s one down the street here that gives tokens (Taler) which you can use to buy half a roll at a local bakery and so on. I just hand the tokens back – my life is complicated enough already.

This week, the Hirsch Apotheke gave me a small soap in the form of the A for Apotheke. I am very pleased with this because it is so bizarre.

This is difficult. I tend to forget covers and look at the inside of a book. Sometimes I hesitate to buy a book with a cover showing the actors in the latest TV or film adaptation, especially if I read the book before it was adapted.

Most covers seem to date. Possibly a foodie book, like Jennifer McLagan’s Fat – you can see a picture of the cover in the right margin here.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, which I read last year. In fact, I was on the ferry from Dunkirk and they had no English Sunday papers, and I had nothing with me, and this was the only book they had I could face reading. It was a great read. I know the author is working on a sequel, but in the mean time she was ill – she wrote a hospital diary for the LRB.

Am I really only halfway through this meme? Must press on.

Here is my second colleague’s book. The photo is not too good.

Details on the publisher’s website (in German).

This is a synoptic translation: the original German on the left, sometimes descriptive, sometimes parts of legislation, and the English version, by Fry & Bonthrone Partnership, on the right.

I must say I haven’t used this much. I used to use its predecessor quite a lot, but that was in the days when I actually translated German accounting texts. Since then I think the translation of accounts between German and English has become more specialized, and the subject has become more complex with the introduction of the IFRS – this book has a nice table comparising IFRSs, US GAAP and German Accepted Accounting Principles, but there’s lots more reading out there.

Anyway, this is the Bible on accounting translation from German to English. And I actually used it in December when I had a short urgent job containing a small balance sheet from Switzerland, but only to remind me of what I ought to know.

If you want to buy this, at 48 euros, note that it dates from 2005 and there may well be another edition in the pipeline – but of course, nobody knows how long a pipeline is, especially with publishers (my personal bugbear is the new edition of Volker Triebel et al. Englisches Handels- und Wirtschaftsrecht, which if we are very lucky, and rich, we may get before Christmas, but it has been promised for years – the publisher says ‘third quarter 2011’). In fact I heard that there may be a new synoptic work coming out covering German GAAP, the Bilanzrechtsmodernisierungsgesetz and IFRSs.

One thing I regret about this book is that it lacks an index. In fact, every time I open it I look for an index, but there never is one. At the same time, it’s extremely complex and long and indexing would be a nightmare.

Fey / Fladt: Deutsches Bilanzrecht / German Accounting Legislation

Die 4., vollständig überarbeitete und aktualisierte Auflage des “Brooks/Mertin” enthält drei Teile, die jeweils in deutsch und englisch verfasst sind.